Go Where They Want You

A bit of circular reasoning

I am beginning to believe life is a circle. Not a perfect one; the line gets a bit lost and lopsided in places. Still, it loops back to the beginning not just once but time after time after time.

Not a circle, then—a spiral. A concentric gathering place of things I’ve already spoken, lessons I’ve already learned.

It’s not like Groundhog Day, it’s not a total reset. It’s the realization that you don’t just learn a thing once. You learn it in levels. Each time you come back you dig a bit deeper.

So here I am, a person of unarguable middle age, realizing for the hundredth (?) time that I am knocking on the wrong door.

This is all a bit vague.
Let me specify.

Only recently—a matter of weeks ago—I circled back upon myself to realize that I was knocking on doors which would never open to me, because I had forgotten who I was.

That sounds like a bad thing. It’s not.

At the beginning of the year I wrote about the Hard Nos—an avalanche of literary rejections. Being a writer who writes for the world involves knocking on a lot of doors knowing that very few of those doors will open for you.

The trick is that you don’t know, before you knock, which doors will never open and which doors will crack immediately and which doors you should keep returning to, time and again until you finally decipher the secret code or land on the lucky number.

It is, as my writer friend Nicole says, “posh gambling.”

But since I have aspirations of literary success far beyond the limits of self-publishing, I keep showing up at the doors. I keep knocking.

Recently I’ve been repeatedly visiting three different sorts of doors:

1. Literary magazines, to which I send essays and poetry and creative nonfiction and flash pieces in the hopes they will get published and garner me a tiny bit of cash and a large amount of acclaim and thousands of new readers.

I have been sending words to literary magazines for a couple of years now, and every once in awhile one of them will say yes and publish something I’ve written. It’s a lovely little endorphin rush.

2. Writing residencies, for whom I create a whole little show-and-tell presentation about LaDonna The Artist and all the great and wonderful ideas she has in her head, if only they would grant her the time and space in which to pull the ideas forward into the light so they can dazzle everyone for miles around.

I’ve only begun applying to writing residencies within the last year or so, not for lack of space in which to write because I have the loveliest writing room at home. I want to attend a residency because I want to spend a couple of weeks in a place where writing is my only reason for being. In real life I am constantly interrupted by the comings and goings of people and dogs and duties, all of whom I love and adore but still. The other massive perk of a writing residency is that you get to meet other writers. And writers need to know other writers, if only to have someone to talk to who is intimately acquainted with this particular brand of madness.

3. Literary agents, to whom I have been pitching a particular book I’ve been writing. If I can get an agent to get really excited about my book, then they will request to read the full manuscript, and if that manuscript holds their attention and keeps them excited, then they will request to meet me and if they like me after that meeting, they will offer to represent me and we will both sign a contract and then we will begin doing the dance all over again, only together this time, and for publishers.

Last November when I had only about 20,000 words on paper for my manuscript and 60,000 more to go, I began querying literary agents. If you’re writing fiction, you need to have a complete manuscript before you seek the representation of an agent. But if you write nonfiction, as I do, you can get by with a few solid chapters and a demonstrable plan. I had read a lot about querying agents; I knew the process could take a long while. So I started knocking on those doors early, in the hopes that the search for an agent would spur me on to higher daily word counts and that I’d finish my book just in the nick of time.

I was right. Just before lunch on February 13, I finished the first draft of my book: 294 pages, 78,777 words. Two weeks later, an agent asked to read it.

And here’s where I circle back to the circle with which I began. Because somewhere along the way, between sniffling over rejections in the first week of January and signing with a literary agency the first week of March, I had a Big Huge Realization knock me upside the head.

The only thing was, I’d had this realization before.

If you’d asked me within the last weeks whether or not I knew myself well, I would have rolled my eyes and laughed. I mean, have you met me? Of course I know myself well. I’ve been pulling things out of my head and lining them up on a page since I could hold a pen. I’m an Enneagram 4, an avowed Navel Gazer, a Writer of Public Confessionals. I’m well acquainted with my own innards and the workings thereof.

And yet.

There I was knocking on doors I had no business knocking on, hat in my hands like, “Oh ma’am, if you please.” Asking for permission with my tail between my legs. Acting like I was the invisible girl on the school bus listening to the cheerleaders cackle behind my back.

As if I didn’t know myself at all. As if I had forgotten from whence I came, and why.

I’ve been obsessed, you see, with the Literary Lesbians. I could rattle off a whole bunch of names but the point is that, to me, these women are the Cool Girls. They’ve written books that blew my hair back and socks askew. They’re brilliant, they’re funny, they’re wickedly talented, and they’ve got multiple luggage lockers of trauma to unpack. I admire and adore them. I read everything they write. I kind of, in no small amount, want to be them.

But I am not them. That’s what I forgot, when I went knocking on the doors of the Cool Girls’ Literary Agents and Magazines and Residencies. I am not a Literary Lesbian.

In forgetting myself, I forgot that I am not here to seek validation. I’m here because I have something to say. Something uniquely my own. Something that the Cool Girls cannot say, because it does not belong to them.

So I went to all these doors and I knocked on them ever so meekly as if they would be doing me a favor to say Yes, as if they’d be granting me a boon.

And when the Nos started rolling in as they always do because not everything can be a Yes for everyone, I took those Nos and tucked them inside the valves of my heart. I granted them weight and meaning that they did not deserve.

This is the lesson I’ve learned, again, for the hundred-thousandth time. This is the circle I’ve circumnavigated: I have a gift, I have a calling, I have stories to tell that no one but me can put on a page. And I don’t need anyone’s permission to do that.

When I remembered that, everything changed.

I wasn’t knocking on doors asking for permission, I was out with a lantern looking for my people. I wasn’t saying, “If you please,” I was saying, “Is it you?”

And that’s where things got really good.

The literary agent I’ve signed with is not a Literary Lesbian from Park Slope. She’s a Midwest gal with a daughter just a few years younger than my own. And the first words she wrote to me after she read my query letter were: “This is fascinating! Can I read more?”

I sent her my full manuscript on a Thursday afternoon. Monday morning she emailed me after reading the whole thing and said, “Let’s talk!” The next day we talked so much, for so long, we went an hour past our scheduled Zoom window. The day after that, she sent an offer of representation to my inbox.

And now I have a partner who loves my writing and believes in the value of my work. Together we are shining up a book proposal so that someday not too far from today, my book will be sitting on the shelf of a bookstore near you.

“Go where it’s warm,” I quoted Benjamin Schafer just a few short weeks ago. He was writing about literary rejections and about his disappointment in not getting into one particular MFA program he applied to, even though he had acceptances from three other universities.

“Go where it’s warm,” his mentor Susan told him, and what she meant was: “Go where they want you.”

“In the years since then,” he wrote, “Susan’s advice has proved a helpful strategy for maintaining a tolerance for rejection in a business in which rejection is the rule rather than the exception.”

I thought I heard this lesson when I read his article in January. I thought I learned it. But I had only scratched the surface. Coming back to myself, reminding myself who I am and where I come from and what I am trying to do here, that was digging another layer deeper down.

By letting go of the myth of the Cool Girls, I found the agent who was perfect for me. Ex-Religious Former Midwest Farm Girl and Current Aspiring Bog Witch Me.

All I had to do find her was to go where it’s warm. To go where I’m wanted.

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